Silence Above and Below: Aharei Mot 5779

Ze’ev Wilhelm Falk was a professor of law at Hebrew University who also served as rector and faculty at the Schechter institute in Jerusalem. Born in Breslau in 1923, he fled Germany alone at 16, arriving in Israel in 1939, and went on to study in the Hevron yeshivah and then at Hebrew University. He is best known as a scholar of religious law and ethics (I lived near his home on HaRav Berlin in 1991 and bought a copy of his book of this title from him), but he also wrote poetry and prayers. If you look at the Yom HaShoah section of the daily Siddur Sim Shalom (p.202), you will find a powerful prayer that he wrote called “Silence” (דומיה):

Avinu Malkenu—Is it possible that our prayer is not acceptable to You? Attend those who are bereft—You are silent in the presence of the blood of sucklings! You stood by as the blood of Your children was shed—has Your strength failed. Our prayer is diminished, our Torah has been compromised. Listen to the sound of our silence.

In this poem Falk juxtaposes the words דם (blood) and דום (silent) to great effect. Human prayer is voiced but unheard—it might as well be silence. Babies bleed and cry—but elicit no divine response. What became of the listening and responsive God who spoke to Cain, saying, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil” (Gen. 4:10, trans. Alter). What of Ezekiel’s image of Israel as a bloody baby taken up by God and told to live (Ez. 16:6)? What of the “still small voice” that greeted Elijah (1 Kg 19:12)? Rabbinic literature often states, “when X happened, the strength of Y failed (תשש כחו).” But here it is God whose strength has failed (תש כחך), and as a result, so too have the prayers and Torah of Israel failed. Suffering, screams, and supplications—none of it matters, so it seems, to the silent God. In a bitter closing, the poet instructs God to listen to the sound of our silence. After the Shoah, we literally give God the silent treatment.

Not that silence is always a rebuke. Psalm 65 beautifully states that “To You silence is praise, God” and then describes God as the one “Who listens to prayer” (שֹׁמֵעַ תְּפִלָּה). In a healthy system, God listens even when we don’t voice our prayers aloud. In a broken spiritual system, God is silent and unmoved even by the screams of our children. The only honest response to such silence is silence in return.

True, the Psalmist instructs one who faces injustice, “Be still before the Lord and wait for him” (38:7, trans. Alter). In the Talmud the sages state that sometimes silence earns reward, but other times speech is demanded (b. Zevahim 116b). I especially love the passage in the Talmud (b. Brakhot 32b) in which Moses is struck silent and weak at the time of the golden calf incident, until God gives him a hint, saying “leave me be and I’ll strike them” which made Moses realize that “it’s up to me” (דבר זה תלוי בי) and helps him find his voice once more, standing in prayer and demanding mercy.

With this we return to the silence of Aaron in Parshat Shmini, when his sons Nadav and Avihu were suddenly struck dead. The Torah states that Aaron was silent, but what was the content of his quiet? Fear, rage, sorrow? It is hard to know, because Aaron doesn’t speak very much in the Torah. I searched for the words ויאמר and וידבר together with אהרן and found many times when Moses or God speaks to Aaron, but not many when he speaks for himself. In fact his most dramatic speeches are at the golden calf, and then his curt reply to Moses after the death of his sons. But in Numbers 12 Aaron does find his voice—first he and Miriam speak out against their brother’s wife, but then after Miriam is stricken ill, Aaron advocates for his sister with two powerful verses: “O, my lord, account not to us the sin which we committed in our folly. Let her not be as one dead, who emerges from his mother’s womb with half his flesh eaten away.” In this passage, Aaron tries to placate Moses with submissive language, and twice acknowledges their sin. Then he crafts a frankly repulsive image of a decayed fetus that has been stillborn, shocking Moses into sympathy and action for his sister, who after all saved him when he was a baby.

Perhaps this is what Zeev Falk intended with his Yom HaShoah prayer. To shock the listener and to shock God with the utterly unacceptable state of affairs. The entirety of Jewish life from the Torah text through our prayers and laws is predicated on the dignity and worth of our lives, and on the compassion and protection of our God. Too often it seems not to be so, yet we continue to pray and call out for help. But then come periods like the Shoah when we cannot return to our naïve faith so quickly. We exhaust our prayers, our tears, our cries and fall into silence. Like all silence, it is of uncertain meaning—is it fear, rage, or sorrow? Or could this be the silence of anticipation and hope? On Yom HaShoah we fall silent and listen to our own sorrow, seeking to find any voice—our voice, God’s voice, the voice of a friend—that will allow us to feel, to act and to believe once again.